Zero to 200 and Back: 'Science Project' gets a second run.

We drove the Lingenfelter Corvette 185 miles from Ann Arbor to Oscoda to burn off the fuel the car arrived with to make sure it was running on pump gas. On that late-fall day, the 50-degree temperature was about 15 degrees cooler than on our initial test day four weeks earlier.

The first run was uneventful. Then, as the car sat in the pits immediately after and we were downloading the data, we heard a loud boing! The crew inspected the car and found a severely cracked right-front brake rotor. A used spare set of front rotors was installed, and the car made another run.

"Boing!" we heard again back in the pits. Another rotor cracked, this time the left front. The last spare rotor was installed, and the driver was informed that run No. 3 would likely be his last.

It was a terrific run. The Lingenfelter sizzled though the quarter in 11.3 seconds at 147 and by 200 mph had caught the Heffner GT, reaching that mark in 18.9 seconds. The Vette lost some time in the transition to the brakes and stopped the clock at 27.0 seconds, a half-second longer than the GT’s performance. That would have been good for second place, but the other cars might also have run quicker on the cooler day.

Just as the crew was mulling over a fourth and final run, we heard our least-favorite sound: Boing! Another rotor bit the dust. Curiously, these cracking rotors were the only brake problems encountered on any of the cars, and the Lingenfelter Corvette did make a run on the first day with no problem. Nicholas Cheek, an R&D engineer at Baer, later explained that they’ve done 200-mph stops dozens of times with no failures and are looking into what caused the cracking rotors. The LPE crew simply shrugged and loaded their science project onto the trailer.